(2013) Collateral Damage (27 page)

He dismembered the bullets on the kitchen table with a pair of
electrician's pliers he found in a drawer. The Armenian had emptied the powder from
all of them and then skilfully crimped them back together again, with the exception
of the one that had made him suspicious in the first place. Probably the ouzo had
made him careless. He had deliberately been given a weapon he couldn't protect himself
with.
But by whom?
Had Siegfried given Fouche-Larimand
all the safe houses? Was the drunken Armenian, like Le Poidevin, one of his men?
It would certainly explain the Frenchman's blasé attitude in the clinic - although
his death had obviously been real enough. The only other explanation was the least
palatable of all: the Front no longer trusted him; did not wish to see him properly
armed. Perhaps he wasn't coming home at all. Perhaps Cyprus was hostile territory.

Koller started to search the flat for a gun. One of the bedrooms
was locked - he guessed it was her room. He went into the bathroom and took the
top off the cistern, but there was nothing taped to the inside. He used a pen-knife
to unscrew one of the panels off the bath and all that revealed was dust. He checked
behind the books and records in the wall-unit in the living room and delved among
the upholstery. Then he went into the kitchen. First he tried the more obvious places
- drawers, cupboards. After that he started on the fridge, feeling the packages
wrapped in tin foil in the deep freeze compartment, moving about the yogurts and
cheeses in the main section. The last place he tried was the cupboard under the
sink unit. There was a plastic bucket and a few cleaning materials inside. He pulled
these out. Behind them, wedged between the two drainpipes from the double unit,
was a tin-foil-wrapped package. As soon as he touched it he knew he had found what
he was looking for. It was a Czech .25 Vzor automatic, fully loaded and with a spare
magazine of eight bullets. It had been first wrapped in an oil rag, sealed in a
polythene bag and then covered in the foil as a final protection. He liked that.
It was professional, neat.

The terrorist took it into his bedroom and tried the action.
It appeared to work well. He wiped the surplus oil off it and put the gun and the
spare magazine under his mattress. Then he wrapped the old revolver in the same
packaging and put it between the pipes. It was a good deal larger than the original,
but it would pass a casual inspection.

Rebecca was having trouble with the Beirut call. She had tried
dialling it from a call-box on the automatic code for ten minutes, and had then
gone to a hotel she sometimes used, where the operator told her there was a thirty-minute
delay on calls to the Lebanon. In fact it was almost an hour before they connected
her and she spent the time pacing up and down, chain-smoking. When she got through
Abu Kamal told her about Fitchett and the trouble they were having getting Dove
out of the country. There was no chance of them arriving that night. It might take
a couple of days.

'He's very nervous. I'm not sure I can keep him. He's as jumpy
as a grasshopper.'

'Why do you think he's nervous?'

'He's lying about things. That machinery our friend in Athens
gave him. He's lying about that.'

'That machinery isn't in working order.'

'I know. But why is he lying?'

'Perhaps he knows we're suspicious.'

They had decided to maintain the lie as far as she was concerned.
They knew she would gladly kill a traitor.
Would even think it
clever to let the Englishman do it.
Sacrificing a loyal comrade in the cause
of fraternal peace might be another matter.

She wanted to say, 'Are you absolutely sure this story of his
is lies?' But she took a pride in the fact that she never questioned orders. Indiscipline
was the Arab curse. They had to learn to be like the Israelis, like the Israelis
had learned to be like the Nazis. The Front hammered that into you.

 
So she said: 'What should
I do?'

'Keep him sweet. Tell him there's been a delay. An important
conference has come up- something like that. Tell him we will be there in a couple
of days. Has he asked about Dove yet? There have been newspaper reports.'

'No. He hasn't asked. We've hardly spoken.'

'If he does tell him we sent the Englishman home. Understand?'

'Yes.'

'And keep him sweet. Whatever you do, keep him sweet. You know
how to capture a grasshopper?' His voice had taken on the excited, schoolboyish
edge adopted by Arab men when they are about to be slightly risqué with a woman.
'You stroke all his legs.'

'I don't believe this one's legs are for stroking.'

'My dear, he's not made of stone.'

When she came back Koller was sitting in the kitchen drinking
coffee and reading about his bomb in London in an old copy of the Herald Tribune
he had found about the place.

He could see straight away that something was troubling her.
She would, he thought, never be anything other than a cut-out or a courier. She
found it difficult to wear a mask.

He took the news of the delay far more calmly than she had expected.
'The front-line soldier is always at the bottom of the list,' he said with mock
solemnity. 'My father used to say that.'

The terrorist pointed to the article he had just been reading.
'This schoolteacher Stephen Dove - I see now why you asked me about him. I had forgotten
the name of the woman who died in the London bomb. I suppose he was the one who
beat up my friend. Is he her brother or husband?'

'Husband.'
She noticed that it was 'the
woman who died in the London bomb', not 'the woman I killed'.

'Do you know what's happened to him?'

'We killed him in Beirut,' she said, obeying orders.

'Was that necessary?' He surprised himself with the question.
'They thought so. He was a nuisance. You don't approve?'

'I should have thought it would have been easier to lead the
master sleuth, Mr Sherlock Holmes from the Yard, to him.'

'Well, it wasn't,' she said stubbornly.

 
'Has the body been found?'

'No – and it won't be.'

'I see,' said Koller.
'Poor bastard.
First we kill his wife with a bomb that should never have been planted - then we
kill him for getting angry about it. That's the nice thing about our organisation.
We never make little mistakes.'

'What about your friend in London? Didn't he deserve it for what
happened to her?'

'Ruth enjoyed playing with fire and she got burned. I can't hold
it against him.'

Dear God, she thought.
Male solidarity.

'Did your father tell you that too - about playing with fire?
Tell me about him.' She wanted to change the subject.

'OK. Let's have lunch.'

They went to an outdoor restaurant which served a good mezze
and where the waiters were friendly although it was midafternoon and most of the
tables already cleared. They ordered a bottle of Othello red wine. The woman didn't
drink much, but Koller made up for her. And over the Turkish coffee and glasses
of the local orange liqueur known as filfar the German told her about his father.

'He was a Nazi - still is. So were most adult Germans between
1933 and 1945, although they would never admit it. But he was a one hundred per-center.
Joined the SS when he was eighteen or nineteen - just before the
war.
Not the Totenkopfverbande, the concentration camp bastards; the Waffen
SS. They were supposed to be the imperial guard, the stormtroopers. Of course, they
were Nazis too, but they claim they did their killing in battle. The relatives of
a few dead partisans around might beg to differ, but they would say they were no
worse than the Americans in Vietnam or the French in Algeria or the British in Northern
Ireland-'

'Or the Jews in Palestine,' the woman interrupted.

'Yes.
Or the new fighting Super Jew.
Have you heard the one about the old Nazi who dies and goes to hell and meets the
Fuhrer?'

She shook her head.

'"What's the news?" asks Hitler.'

'"Mein Fuhrer, the news is bad. The Germans are now the
best merchants in the world and the Jews are the best soldiers." '

She smiled and gazed into his eyes. They were very blue, she
thought.

'Anyway, he spent a lot of time in France working with the Milice
against the Maquis. That's where he met FoucheLarimand - the man I saw in Athens.
Then during the Normandy fighting he was quite badly hurt fighting the British around
Caen.'

The woman nodded, not quite understanding all the references.
It was somebody else's war and it happened a long time ago. The only war she knew
was her own.

'When he came out of hospital they made him a Standarten (Uhrer-
that's about a colonel in most people's armies - and he was posted as liaison officer
on the staff of the Charlemagne Division serving on the Russian front. He ran into
FoucheLarimand again there. They were all French fascists in the Division - Pierre
Laval's crowd. There were a lot of foreigners in the SS, mostly Slavs, Ukranians
- people like that. But there were also a few West Europeans - Dutchmen, Danes,
Norwegians, Belgians; all fighting communism in the name of the New Order. As a
liaison officer my father came into contact with a lot of these people. Then, a
couple of months before Hitler did the decent thing, Standartenfuhrer Koller was
wounded again and for him the war was over. I was about three years old at the time.
'Afterwards, I suppose for a man in his late twenties with a gammy leg who had been
a soldier all his adult life, he didn't do so badly. We starved for a while like
everybody else. Then he got involved in some deals in war scrap. I think he might
have dealt in the black market too. He made quite a lot of money, taught himself
some engineering and established his own manufacturing business-car components.

'After that, as the saying goes, he never looked back. Only that
wasn't true. He always looked back. He could never forget. Like a lot of old Nazis
he saw the Cold War as a complete vindication of all he had fought for. He got involved
in the campaign for pension rights for Waffen SS people. He was always attending
various reunions all over the country. Then some of the survivors of the West European
Divisions came out of their holes and began to attend these meetings. That's how
he met up with people like Fouche-Larimand again - just after he'd come back from
Algeria.

 
'I'm the only son. I was
never very close to him although he always wanted to be close to me. Maybe it was
something to do with the fact that he couldn't walk without a cane, so I was never
able to play the sort of rough games with him most kids can. My mother was a Nazi
too, had the full SS wedding, went through all the formalities; traced their family
trees to prove there was not a trace of the Jew in their genes; submitted pictures
of themselves in bathing-suits to the Reichfuhrer's office to show that they looked
like the right Aryan stock, fit to breed the superrace.
Me and
my sister.

'He was always trying to lead me into his crazy dreams and I
never really wanted to know. We used to go on holidays to the Black Forest, a place
near Ulm, and he used to take a pistol he'd kept an old '08 Luger. We'd walk deep
into the woods. It was difficult for him and he sometimes had to beat a path through
the undergrowth with his stick. When we came to a quiet clearing we'd find some
targets, or maybe he'd bring an old can with him, and blaze away. Can you imagine
me, ten years old, blazing away at a can in the middle of a Hansel and Gretel wood,
with a real Luger? You would think I'd be a very happy little boy. Not a bit. It
terrified me. I was sworn to secrecy. It was all part of what made me different
from other kids.

'When I was at school the Nazis seemed to be Hitler and about
one hundred other people including my father. Do you understand me? None of the
other kids had parents who admitted they were Nazis. They'd all been secret resisters
in the Wehrmacht, or good Catholics who'd never approved of Hitler, or knew somebody
who knew somebody who had been in a concentration camp. To hear them talk about
what their fathers
did you'd think
the Martians must have
been masquerading as Germans after 1933. It was incredible. Maybe there were a few
Mein Kampfs going musty in their attics too, but ours was the only one still on
the bookshelf and to hell with de-Nazification.'

'You sound almost proud of him?' She was looking at him quizzically,
noting the anguish, the way he wanted to talk.

'No. I'm not proud of him. The others had the sense to be ashamed,
to realise that, to some extent, they all shared the guilt. His answer is to say:
there is no need for guilt – it was necessary. So in my case, as any pop psychiatrist
will tell you, I rebelled against my father. Of course, most kids rebel against
their father. My rebellion was extreme because he was extreme.

 
'But
I under-estimated him.
I thought I'd defeated him - not just broken away,
but rubbed his face in it.
Not at all.
He plotted revenge.
He and Fouche-Larimand and others like him, all exSS, formed this European organisation
they call the Charlemagne Circle after that French Division.

'The way I see it my father's Charlemagne and FoucheLarimand
was his Count Palatine. What they do is get themselves into a position where they
can control Marxist guerrilla groups and then get them to do things that are counterproductive.
In one area we're on the same side. I'm not talking about your revolution, the Palestinian
revolution, because it's basically a national one. But most European revolutionary
Marxists I know believe that in order to overthrow the so-called democracies you've
got to sting them into betraying their true totalitarian face so that the workers
get the message and throw them out. Naturally, the essential difference is that
my father and his Paladins believe that if the capitalists cracked down they would
have popular support. You'd just take out the first thousand leftists and shoot
them a la Chile.